


Web of Pandora

by cinemarss



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Are They Used Correctly? No, Blood and Injury, Character Study, Control Issues, Deity Clay | Dream (Video Blogging RPF), Dream | Clay Has Powers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Not Beta Read, Prison, Red String of Fate, Threats of Violence, but not romantic - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28920264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinemarss/pseuds/cinemarss
Summary: The memories are bitter now, as coherent faces he once admired from a distance did nothing but irritate and challenge his word. Faces that lowered their eyes and sneered, and believed that with such a gift they could serve Dream’s position better than he ever would. Those same faces had doubled over, had swirling desperation within their eyes and a relieving epiphany, flooded with ecstasy just the previous evening at the thought that it was over.ThatDreamwas over.His index finger trembles anew, and desires morph to instead embrace the curve beneath someone’s jaw and choke till scratches of carmine terror line his arms....Dream reflects upon his fate in the prison, and finds his thoughts wandering far and between.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 70





	Web of Pandora

__

_Tick._

_Tick._

_Tick._

...

* * *

...

The clock’s inanimate pulse is the only source of sonance that reflects against ebony walls, repetitive in motion and unyielding in its purpose. The hands move with each passing second, a simple reminder of his own epoch—the passage of a world—still persisting, even as his own two feet remain absent from the rooted surface. The device is devoted in nature; never once faltering to update the minute, to announce each waking moment that terrene forces are abandoning the last. It would be admirable to have such a purpose, if not for the _blistering_ ire that the chronograph suffocated him with.

The air sifting through his lungs carries noise from miles away, a delicate whisper illustrating what iridescent eyes could no longer gaze upon. Every simmering wallow from untamed magma, every weighted exhale rapturing past his throat, and every distant mechanism turning to the chamber’s demands bellows down at his form in agonizing caterwaul. It’s taunting. A jeer made to pinpoint his enigmatic presence, to deride with the remnants of a day’s events and bash his skull till it’s all he knew—purposeful in nature. Another wave of nausea crashes over his shoulders at the knowledge that such a mockery was meant for another.

Even with such an acrimony seizing at his being, Dream remains lethargic against the corner of the alcove. His index finger twitches once or twice, brushing against the worn leather of archery bracers with the urge to dig nails tightly against weary skin. The phantom sensation of dried crimson and mud underneath calloused hands is _intoxicating,_ and not once had the temptation of burying canines into his own wrist ever been so overwhelmingly appealing. It’s an addiction, reeling in the back of his mind with promises of release and control—even with blood pouring from his broken frame—that _he_ is the one pulling the strings. _He_ is the one with the scissors, dull from eons of genocide and manic elation, slicing down the lives of pitiful meaning with one snap of the blades. _He_ is the one who reigns as the immortal warden of the world.

Even with such a bargain, porcelain lays dull upon his face, and Dream does not dare to move.

It would be a pointless endeavor, in the end. To break open his own flesh and spill the blood upon a chamber’s polished surface with his own mouth would be admitting a sense of defeat, even though he _knows_ his current position is nothing more than a feeble obstacle in his path. Even Sam could not create a labyrinth large enough to hold him away, and if it took him thousands of years beyond the concept of life itself—long past everyone’s final lives, when age took them down and held their head beneath murky waters—he’d find his way. He’d win. No amount of fatigue and scoria could break a life within his being, even if everyone’s broken eyes had screamed and _begged_ for such a fact to be otherwise.

Dream tilts his head at the thought, pressing the side of his skull against a cooling tract of obsidian walls. A distant stretch of basalt strays from the molten cascade just outside, splashing to the surface of the niche till its hissing presence evaporates to humid air. Malachite cloth clings to the nape of his neck in a layer of sweat, grazing in motion with his crooking joints at the slightest gesture. Slowly, his shoulder shifts for digits clasp at the hem of his hood—prying the fabric from its viscous hold and gracing his bare collar with the ability to breathe. Compared to the realm often ventured past a portal of flint and ash, the heat of the metaphorical cell was next to nothing. Even with the endurance, however, his body seeped of liquidized exhaustion, and he lay awake with a sheet of his own mortality since the waterfalls lowered behind him but a day before.

_Mortality that was insignificant. As was the idea that Pandora’s Vault—in all its architectural brilliancy—could contain Dream for a second._

He was already free, in concept. Possibilities had laid before his eyes ever since he was a child, and he had learned to pick his paths and maneuver every second to his favor at such a gift. He had climbed the ranks of society with fictitious charm and reached every desire without fault, fueling a dissatisfaction of such a civilization till realms were but another empty world to him. Faces blurred to smiles, to attachments weakening the general populace and he lost nothing when those smiles would turn to him and he’d twist away, breaking any chance they’d ever have. Competitions declined with every victorious outcome, and monetary profit was flimsy at best. Nothing was ever enough. It never would be, not until a face would break from the collective blur and define a feature before his very eyes. A chance of fate.

Dream took those chances, and met individuals like him. Individuals worth more than the unanimous hivemind of insufficient expansion—ones whose eyes were clear, were brisk and defined beyond a simple dotted mask of facaded bliss. With fingers tangling and joining between his own, he began to live. The hands had guided him to the smallest of details, ones he had once found trivial and dull in color—ones, when flipped on their side, glared with a vibrancy he thought was dead. Dream had smiled and howled with laughter, and ran through fields of grass with others chasing after, and nothing had ever been so bright as it was then. The world had never been so genuine till he wrapped palms about the hands of others, raising them to the sky with a cheer at a victory all of them worked for. Low and high voices laughed and screamed in exaggerated accents, and for once, Dream was alive.

The memories are bitter now, as coherent faces he once admired from a distance did nothing but irritate and challenge his word. Faces that lowered their eyes and sneered, and believed that with such a gift they could serve Dream’s position better than he ever would. Those same faces had doubled over, had swirling desperation within their eyes and a relieving epiphany, flooded with ecstasy just the previous evening at the thought that it was over.

That _Dream_ was over.

His index finger trembles anew, and desires morph to instead embrace the curve beneath someone’s jaw and choke till scratches of carmine terror line his arms.

The idea in itself is so humorous that animosity, as his second nature, burns to its end and leaves his shoulders shaking. Vexation had rarely flourished to such a degree, and to not only be without a familiar handle weighted in his hands—but to be without _anything_ to wedge liquid burgundy from—its almost enough to raise his arms. To snap his own neck at the pure _inanity_ of such a conviction. A braced smirk had him decreed to a life of captivity until deemed otherwise, and believed with such _certainty_ that it was finally over—and that same smirk belonged to the very boy he had in ruins just months before. They all firmly hoped, had prayed to a god unknown, that Dream was done for good.

It was all a game.

A pawn on the chessboard had protested against the player, and the pieces of a checkered land—who couldn’t even see beyond black and white—finally banded together to tie the player’s fingers. Pitiful, futile pawns who still couldn’t comprehend that the world was muddled with grays, and that the few who could were condemned to a spineless will and silenced by majority. They may have tied the fingers down, yet the player has a second hand—and in this world the player was their god, calculating every move to the outcome they desired.

The chessboard is without a player, they all believe. Yet they fail to realize the shadow of his form never left, and still lingers above their stage.

A laugh, raw and unnerving, slips ceremoniously from his lips—and though the muffle of porcelain smothers the chuckle to near silence, the shift of ash in the air does more than enough to inject his veins with euphoria. Control is a drug, and in every sense he was a man nearing overdose with just how much he possessed. He hadn’t a clue as to how Sam managed to regulate surveillance on the cell, but if his own vitriolic snickers managed to alarm the hybrid enough for gunpowder and adrenaline to tense in the air, then Dream couldn’t find himself to care. It didn’t even matter if Sam was miles away, off building another jungle of redstone and machinery—as the air of the prison had settled long during its construction, and with it, Sam’s own essence was linked to the area as if it were his other half. Dream could threaten the man of all his lives, and the ground he stood on itself would vibrate with distress.

The hybrid had no knowledge of such a fact, of course. Only Dream had managed to steer his gaze and envisage the strings of fate and attachment—to see how elements and mortals bonded to a personal level, to feel the same destruction as another, even across time. Only he had been able to sever his own strings, to cut the thread from his wrists and remove himself from the constraints of the world. Even in a chamber as small as this, he can squint his eyes blearily through the slits of his mask and see the beryl strands lining from the corners of the room.

Sam’s threads were unique in color. As are most hybrids in essence, each holding a tint unparalleled to anything within basic humanity—something special which, even now, served to calm his nerves with observation. The strings were bright emerald, muddled along with splotches of darker hues and variations. The smell of lightning and fire laced around the hints of gold and silver which shifted into vision occasionally, and once Dream had managed to spot a red so deep that he thought Sam had lost a life. Only the grueling texture of stone reassured that it was just the man’s affinity for redstone, for the same red had only been seen when someone was slain and robbed of a chance.

One of the threads leads to his own finger, and Dream’s smile is genuine when all of the strands of different origin brighten the second he wills them to. Every single person who had stepped within the realm was wrapped around his grasp, whether they knew it or not—and clasping his palm into a fist sends a gentle reminder to all of them that he was alive. He hadn’t been able to control the threads fully in years, truth be told, yet the small surges of anxiety or doubt he was able to feed into the web was more than enough to placate that inability.

Dream allows himself to get lost in the branching system, unfurling tense digits to gaze fondly at the chroma glaring back. Most of the threads of the world were white, attached to blurred mobs of generations he hadn’t cared for—and when one’s will was finally close to breaking, all hue was lost to the vast expanse of bright and devoted void. He’d watched such loss of color transpire several times, and he found that in the same way as honey clung to his esophagus—it was sweetening, slow, and tantalizing. But even then, none were as captivating as the threads of vibrancy he had managed to collect over time—remnants of the once cognizant plane he had whittled down, of a dull world tied of broken morality. A simple glance over his thumb and shades of bloodied red, roses and ancient temples, of a dimension inaccessible and golden feathers made themselves known—and his own smile grew tenfold in the spur of the moment.

All of the threads cut off circulation from his hands, flesh numb from the pressure of months and months of careful manipulation. Even in the vault, he was in control. He held the puppetry and made the calls, and at the expense of his own sensibility, nothing changed. He was inevitable.

He was a God.

Enmity had almost muted itself beneath the sadism Dream prompted, finding the agitation of it all unnecessary now that he was able to glance back at the bigger picture. In the grand scheme, this was just a chance to rest his constant effort of keeping the realm in line—and if the server wanted to burn without his rule, he’d let it. With charred land a forest grows anew, and just the same, the collected souls will return to him with a newfound sense of dependency. Every thread embracing his skin belonged to him, and past the archery braces he tugs his hand back and the whole plane halts in a moment of surrendering fear.

The silence is deafening, with even the clock quiet in the absence of existence. His own hand blurs against his vision, strands nearly tearing apart at the sheer tension pounding down against gravitational function—and when one in particular, chromatic in pairs and uneasy in a world foreign to its own nearly split in two, Dream rests his fingers around the side. A screech, distant and metallic, resounds from across the world. A gentle waltz accompanies it’s cacophony, and he shuts his eyes and listens. Images of voided lands and forgotten structures flood his mind, and though another side blurs with splattered crimson, he offers it no glance. He already knows it’s design by heart.

When the strand is finally forced back into one, the screaming lowers down to a low whir of despondency. Several clicks and purrs, lined each with guttural growls, sound out occasionally before pure silence returns.

Dream lets his finger go, and sighs. He repeats the process occasionally with the different shades, once hearing a discord of overlapping voices and the next listening to the soft growth of flora, of promises of a world better than the current. At one point there’s a sound of feathers and crunching snow. The sounds of death, of joy, of sorrow and relief each flow independently from the essences and only prompt him to prolong the absence of time further. The fatigue inflicted by the vault’s mechanics slowly grows to inflict against his bones with the consistent uptake, but he pushes his limits further at the notion. Intoxication floods his frame when his palm wraps around the strands all at once, and in a moment’s passing thousands of memories pile against his skull in broken mannerisms. Memories of agonizing wounds, of being shot through the chest and blown up from ones you trusted. Memories of screams, of betrayed voices straining out till words are more than sticks and stones ever were. Memories of doubt, of ending it all, of exhaustion and escapism are all within the palm of his hand.

His whole body _flinches._

Dream lets gentle snickers fester from the back of his throat, murmuring out words not of his own till liquid splashes down against his nails. Salt and decay build against his tongue in copper increments till they’re forgotten in favor of the oxygen hitting against naked skin. His mask had tumbled off elsewhere in a fit of trembling euphoria, and when his gaze pulls into focus he can see the crack against whitened material cave in further. Strands tug uncomfortably against the tip of his hands as he lets go, and even as the pressure grows painful, he still reaches his palms for the familiar visor. Cool surfacing eventually reaches his skin, soothing the cracking bones beneath his mortal frame gently. The smile comforts his hissing body, a smile akin to the crowds of fogged individuals decades past. The smile which remained unchanging, even as his own laughs sputtered into ruthless nausea and blood painted the porcelain sides with every hacking convulsion.

Dream’s nails clasp tighter, and he can hear the distant sound of shattering glass as threads slip dangerously close to sharpened edges. Water threatens at the edge of his vision when his muscles finally cave, and he doubles over with bruised knees to the floor before choking out the rest of his organs. Carmine liquor spills as he strains his last wit to keep the absence of time in check, to give himself time to breathe. Time away from the ones who began it all.

It doesn’t work.

Sensations crash down in waves all in a moment, with yellows and blues seating against pale irises when the forces of nature finally test his stubbornness. He feels the world rotate on its axis, the gentle flow of magma and rooted earth remaining back to their evershifting cycles. The memories change to moments of the present, with a crowd of voices tuning into his auditory in cruel passage. Swallowing down a cry, he feels gravity tuck it’s hold beneath him.

The next minute he’s on the floor, heaving sporadically with whitened vision as humidity and gunpowder fluster inside his lungs. The taste of crimson is still heavy on his tongue, pouring freely from his nose to the maroon stone beneath him. He blinks for minutes on end, attempting to force his body back into proper function with an unconscious hold against ivory surfacing—ignoring how blurry the strings are when colors finally find him through his broken and pitiful attempts. His hand aches, bruised and discolored from misuse and adrenaline, and even as his muscles pulse in protest he finds his fingers curling over. A fist now heavy against obsidian, he waits, and watches a red string tug at his finger obnoxiously.

Across the building, an accent rasps infuriatingly, and Dream slips the mask back on.

The tugging never stops, even as a boy spills his blood and forces his dissolving form to respawn in lukewarm water. Even as doubt festers in blue eyes, as regret and memories of isolation resurface with laughable ease. Even as Dream resists the urge to wrap his hand around pale flesh and force blonde hair to melt with mucus and blood beneath a layer of ash. Even as he’s handed books, offering a facaded promise of writing with genuine care.

Even as Tommy asks him who he misses the most, and suddenly Dream’s own hand is seething beneath magma hours after the boy leaves.

The tugging sensation persists past melting cartilage and tendons, and though glazed eyes watch the fire spread along his sleeve, he sees nothing but red. Gunpowder and lightning wafts in the air, and distantly he understands a voice is yelling at him through static systems. Dream grits his teeth, grinding his own molars down till blood seeps from his mouth once more—and in the next second he dips his head beneath the pool and everything fades to red, red, red.

When he awakens, the darkened ceiling greets him with unwanted familiarity, and his carpus is stiff. He holds the limb against his chest, cupping over with cotton sleeves as the ticking device nearby makes a mockery. He doesn’t have to look down to know what it is. The red string had tangled around his wrist, and now, the colors blended from a healing youth to empty, dull greens. The urge to laugh is there, yet his lungs only spit out a wheezing cough that stutters through a hazed mind. If his eyes water, the only source of emotion he can muster from muddled loss is acrimony. Slanted eyebrows veiled by red porcelain crease further.

Another player sits at the chessboard, now, and Dream tugs on a string impatiently. The bishop piece is heavy in his palm, a lasting epoch making itself known with drawn silence before he shifts in his seat. He places down the chromatic figure, and begins his move.

_Across the world, an enderman hisses and bites at his finger in tandem with fluttering snow. A string tightens, and a waltz beckons further through grief-stricken realization._

_It isn’t over._

...

* * *

...

__

_Tick._

_Tick._

_Tick._

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first time writing anything dsmp related i am so sorry
> 
> 3k words is rather short for me, but i wrote this in the span of a few hours as just a small concept--dream's character in the smp is one of my favorites, so i wanted to play around with ideas for a bit :) i dont think ill continue this little storyline on unfortunately, so sorry if the ending was a cliffhanger bhdfnjdfm. i may come back and edit though, and who knows, maybe i will continue once i get ideas!!
> 
> if u wanna talk to me my twitter is @/cinemarss !! i draw a lot on there :D


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